Written by Howard Gordon & Alex Gansa
Directed by Rob Bowman
Let's get out of the way the
biggest reason in the world this episode will never completely work: Mulder and
Scully survive. This shouldn't be a flaw in a series that's centered around
them, but given the scenario that we are presented with---- the characters
seemed destined to die of old age in a matter of hours--- there is no
believable way that rescue would seem to work. Even the deus ex machina would
be less believable than the fact that once our heroes age what appear to be
fifty years in a matter of days, there shouldn't be any way at all to bring our
heroes back from the dead. This is one major implausibility gap that not even
Mulder's logic or Scully's science should be able to breach.
And then there's the next reason
that this episode doesn't work, even though it probably goes without saying:
the old age makeup for our heroes is dreadful.
When the first jump takes place, it's at least buyable, and one can sort of
say, it's works. With each progression in the makeup, it looks like our heroes
are wearing latex makeup. The makeup department usually does things well, and
I'm told that it took three or four hours to make each successive makeup change
for the series. Couldn't they have realized in that span of time that the
makeup wasn't nearly good enough?
It's a shame, because at least for
the first half of the episode, there are some decent ideas on display. The
teaser is out and out unsettling, one of the best of the second season, and we
feel like we're going to get stuck in what may be a solid conspiracy episode,
and--- let's be honest--- a variation on Ice or Darkness Falls, both of which
are pretty heavily borrowed from here. The episode is helped by a very good
character performance by John Savage as the unfortunate Trondheim
--- a man who has the grave misfortune to get pulled in on one of Mulder's
excursions, and ends up becoming an X-Files himself. And the mystery has some
great imagery when we're confronted with a ship that's rusting from the inside
out, and a captain who is the last survivor of this particular crew. But then,
it starts forming mysteries that it doesn't show much interest in solving, like
what the heck happened to Olfafsson? It's not like he had much of anywhere to
go after Trondheim freed him. But
at this episode seems more interested in having Mulder and Scully age into
oblivion than actually deal with these misfortunes. Instead, we have
embarrassing scenes where Mulder and Scully do an act trying to drink the last
fresh water on the ship, only to have that fresh water immediately destroyed,
so why the heck did Scully have to waste so much time scrounging it up?
I'd like to give this episode more
credit than it probably deserves because for once Howard Gordon is writing an
episode which doesn't have anything to do with supernatural revenge.
Unfortunately, it mostly seems to be a rip-off of his own Firewalker, which as you'll recall,
wasn't that great in the first place. And while the ends is a direct rip-off
from that of Darkness Falls, there's a big difference from being saved from
a swarm of bugs, and being saved from
the traumas of extreme old age by modern medicine. 'Cause serious, if that was
all it took to stave it off, medical science would've bottled it right then,
and it would be at your corner drugstore. And the mood and atmosphere are
great, and they almost seem to carry the day. Notice the emphasis on the word
'almost'
This is one of the few episodes
that I'm actually reversing myself on having seen again. When I saw it the
first time, the atmosphere and mood seemed to carry over some of the problems
with the plot, and I thought it around four stars. Having seen it now, it seems
like little more than a rip-off with an absolute loser of an ending, barely
worth two stars. So I'm going to split the difference. Still, there is one
thing I'm sure of--- Howard Gordon doesn't do pretentious voiceover dialogue
any better than Chris Carter does.
My Score: 3 stars
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